What’s the cheapest way to hit your goal?
Coaching is an investment. Every time I invest in a coaching package or program, there’s always that moment where my stomach gets all tight and grippy and I feel a little bit crazy as I click purchase on a 5-figure investment. Sometimes I even start sweating. (I’m actually sweating a little just writing this.)
And yet, I am here to tell you: coaching is actually the cheapest way to get where you want to go.
I know - your brain is struggling with that, right? I can see you now making crazy eyes at your computer. BUT. Hear me out. Coaching is the cheapest way to solve a problem because it actually addresses the problem at its root.
Most solutions address the symptoms of the problem vs addressing the problem itself. They’re like a bandaid you put on a cut or a pill you take to relieve a headache. They sometimes seem like they’ve solved the problem, but usually, they haven’t. They’ve just hidden it from you. Maybe for an hour (hey, Netflix) or maybe for a few years (hey, corporate career and big fancy paycheck it came with). But sooner or later, if you don’t address the cause, that problem will be back, often stronger than ever.
It’s like deferring on a loan. Yes, that can be a useful strategy sometimes, but it doesn’t make the loan go away. And it costs you money over time, because it keeps racking up interest while you’re not paying it. You can get out of the payment for a while. You can pretend that the loan isn’t there. You can even ignore it, but that doesn’t make it go away, and once you get around to looking at it again, there’s more, not less, of it to deal with.
I see this a lot with career dissatisfaction, or as I like to call it career ennui. (I like to call it ennui because I feel like this marvelous French word captures the particular experience of dread and dissatisfaction that so many smart, ambitious women feel at some point or another in their careers, no matter how hard they’re crushing it.)
I understand the urge to treat the symptoms of career ennui. Feeling dread and dissatisfaction about your work is no fun. I should know - I have spent YEARS of my life struggling with this, often while pretending I wasn’t, trying to convince myself to just love my good-enough job and be happy, damnit. (That was before coaching, and y’all, it did not work. But it did make me feel like shit.)
Here’s how it shakes out: you feel some boredom or longing about your career, it doesn’t feel good but you’re also not sure how to solve it, so you hide it from yourself instead by going after a big promotion even though you don’t actually want to work in your industry anymore. Or you just drink wine every night and try not to think about it. Or you change jobs but don’t address the ennui so it follows you to the next job and contaminates it.
What does coaching do differently? Coaching gets to the heart of the dissatisfaction. And the heart of it isn’t your job, even if you do want to leave that job behind forever. Getting to the heart of the problem is about understanding how you got to where you are in the first place and then addressing the problem there. Where is that, exactly? Inside your head.
Now, listen carefully: I am not saying the problem is just in your head. I am saying that the problem originates in your thoughts. Not because they’re yours, but because so much of our thoughts are just unexamined social conditioning that we use to judge ourselves and make ourselves feel crazy. Of course you can’t solve career ennui while all that internalized bullshit is still in there. And you probably don’t want to. Because who wants internalized patriarchy and white supremacy and other oppressive ideologies hanging out in their big, sexy brain? Not us.
And this brings us back to why coaching is the cheapest solution, even when it’s a 5-figure investment. When we clean that social conditioning out, we can actually create the lives we want to create, without sabotaging ourselves or slowing ourselves down. Coaching is cheaper because it eliminates the forces that keep dragging us back down every time we try to rise. Not the outside forces, but the inside ones. We can handle outside forces, but when it’s us doubting and questioning ourselves inside our own minds, that is when it costs us big time.
But mostly, coaching is also the cheapest way to solve a problem because of the time it saves us. Time is the only resource you can’t get more of. You can get more money. You can get more stuff. But you can’t get more time, and coaching saves you a ton of time. How? Because you are guided through the process of identifying and changing the exact thought patterns that have kept you stuck FOR YEARS.
Is it the only solution? No. Do you have to hire a coach to harness the power of coaching? You sure don’t, and I provide free resources so this work is available to anyone who wants it. But if you want to do what’s cheapest overall, hire a coach and save yourself the time and trouble of figuring it all out on your own.
Ready to try the cheapest solution and hire a coach of your very own? I’ve got good news. I’m launching a group coaching program in January 2021. Join us and blow your own mind with how fast you can fix problems that have been f*cking your sh*t up for years.
Also, bonus: my coaching packages are totally virtual so as to better serve my global audience (and yes, I’ve worked with people who are not native English speakers with great success). Learn more here.